When unapproved ghosts are placed within a Roboport's construction range, all of their "Placeholder" entities are counted as "Missing materials for construction". In a network with lots of unapproved ghosts, the alert window & map view are spammed to uselessness, and construction robot function is greatly impeded (due to the ratelimit on construction network scans). I know the programming of this mod is quite convoluted, but could there still be any way around this? Perhaps adding a script that actually places the placeholder entity for free, so that it is not considered "missing" by the construction network?

Hello Pack,

Hm... I'll have to think a little bit about it... I kinda wish there was some kind of flag that would tell robots to ignore specific entities during build process. Although... That would actually then allow for a nice rewrite of this mod as well (instead of convoluted mess with the additional forces in the game)... Hm... I wonder if devs would be willing to implement something like this...

Best regards,
Branko

Oh, and funny enough that they posted about the cost of ghost-related calculations in latest FFF blog :)

Ok, after starting to look into another bug report (duplication-related), I've discovered that it might be possible to completely do away with the placeholder ghosts. Since version 1.1.86, players can copy (and maybe cut) a friendly force's ghosts/blueprints.

However... This is not the case with deconstruction planner - that is, you will not get visual indication that you have selected the allied force's ghost entities. Although, due to the way deconstruction is handled by the mod, it will still work correctly (minus the already present caveat of not supporting game/player library deconstruction plans).

On the other hand... The deconstruction planner is effectively selecting just the ticks, which is only half-helpful. You get an idea of how many unapproved ghosts will get removed, but not also what they are.

So... At least for the first next release, I'll keep all the boxes ticked (pun intended), but maybe down the line I will revisit this. Perhaps one solution would be to provide both variants via configuration. No promises made, though :)

As for your suggestion on placing the placeholder as an entity... Looks like I've already left a comment for myself in the code back in the day :)

  -- The placeholder has to be a ghost, otherwise it will overwrite the unapproved entity, and mess up the
  -- deconstruction planner interaction

So... That's a no-no, unfortunately (deconstruction planner interaction refers to some undo black magic as well).

Best regards,
Branko